"To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures..."
John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Like so much in the Kennedy legacy, it was left to Teddy to tell the family history. He does so by telling us his story, by showing us his own courage, perseverance and optimism, which was so emblematic of his family. In his autobiography, True Compass: A Memoir, completed just before his death, he takes us with him on his personal voyage of faith, family and politics.

Kennedy's collaborator on this book was his editor Jonathan Karp. Jonathan is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of Twelve, which published True Compass.

Last November I had the chance to talk to Gordon Goldstein about all of this. His ideas are even more important now as the modern day Best and Brightest consider escalating the war in Afghanistan. I will be talking with Gordon again in the next few weeks to update the story and the frightening parallels.

Monday, September 28, 2009

"We are all Keynesians now" is a now-famous phrase coined by Milton Friedman and attributed to Richard Nixon. It is popularly associated with the reluctant embrace in times of financial crisis, of Keynesian economics by individuals who had formerly favored unfettered free market capitalism. The phrase has gained a whole new status as a result of our current financial crisis. Who was John Maynard Keynes and why are his ideas even more embraced today, than upon his death some sixty plus years ago. Robert Skidelsky is the premier Keynes biographer, whose latest book is Keynes: The Return of the Master.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Public Higher education is under siege. Just as private colleges and universities have had to deal with their shrinking endowments, public universities now have to face their grim reality. Two corollary views of where all this might be going. First, a group of bloggers from the World Bank looks at the financial crises facing public universities. Money quote:

With policies of limiting enrollment places and tuition fees, market pressure to add capacity, and government funding unlikely to increase, Moody’s expects unprecedented pressure on the current financial model of public universities.

On the other side an Internet entrepreneur named Burck Smith is tying to use the creative destruction of the Internet to bring the cost of college down to $99 per month. It's an amazing plan with profound implications, if it could work.

Renowned religion historian Karen Armstrong, in her new book The Case for God argues that our religious thinking is surprisingly less sophisticated now than it it has been in the past. She explains how religion was never intended to answer the questions that fall withing the scope of reason or science. The role of religion was to help people live and cope with realities for which there were no easy explanations. She fires a shot across the bow of today's fundamentalists, as she shows that prior to the 17th century no one assumed biblical myths were factual accounts, but were meant to be interpreted and then reinterpreted.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Every day we move further away from being a thoughtful society. We have lost our sense of the responsibilities of citizenship. In our sound bite infused culture, political extremism and the simplistic allure of pop culture have destroyed our ability to think, to reason and most of all to make sound moral judgments. Michael Sandel has been working for over two decades to reverse this. As one of Harvard's most popular professors, more than 12,000 students have taken his course JUSTICE to debate and try and reason through the big questions of political philosophy and moral judgments.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Public Higher education is under siege. Just as private colleges and universities have had to deal with their shrinking endowment, public universities now have to face their grim reality. Two corollary views of where all this might be going. First, a group of bloggers from the World Bank looks at the financial crises facing public universities. Money quote:

With policies of limiting enrollment places and tuition fees, market pressure to add capacity, and government funding unlikely to increase, Moody’s expects unprecedented pressure on the current financial model of public universities.

On the other side an Internet entrepreneur named Burck Smith is tying to use the creative destruction of the Internet to bring the cost of college down to $99 per month. It's an amazing plan with profound implications if it could work.

For over 60 years the Untied Nations has tried to play to role in the peace and security of the world. The UN Security Council and its five permanent members (the US, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China) have been central to that effort. From the Berlin Airlift to the Iraq War, from nuclear proliferation to the global war on terrorism, to genocide in Africa, the council has had some successes and many failures. But even amidst its failures, it's provide a kind of pressure valve for the five powers. David Bosco, in his new book Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World sheds light on the competing visions of what the council is supposed to do vs. what it has actually accomplished and if, in fact, it has any relevance in a globalized 21st Century world.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Do we need a radically new approach to dealing with the international terrorist threat? Richard English, a Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Belfast, argues in his new book Terrorism: How to Respond that we need a totally new approach and that we can no longer afford to ignore the lessons of the past. English argues that we cannot adequately respond to the practical challenge of terrorist violence unless we are more honest about the precise nature of this phenomenon, and about explaining its true and complex causes.

If our inability to learn from the other health care systems in the western world were not enough to sadden us, as T.R. Reid explains in the post below this one, our added inability to keep up with the rest of the world on the quest for energy independence, is but another sad, depressing example of the decline of America. Tom Friedman's column today is a must read reality punch. Money quote:

The other day, Splinter gave me a tour of the company’s Silicon Valley facility, culminating with a visit to its “war room,” where Applied maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years. I could only laugh because crying would have been too embarrassing.Not a single one is in America.Let’s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. I suggested a new company motto for Applied Materials’s solar business: “Invented here, sold there.”The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three perquisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop.

Monday, September 14, 2009

The US claims 37th place in the World Health Organization's rankings of the world's health systems and 15th out of 19 in the Commonwealth Fund's rankings by avoidable mortality in industrialized countries. You would think that as a part of the health care reform debate we'd take a look at nations 1-36 or 1 -14 to learn what's working in other countries. Why, in a scientific enterprise such as medicine, do we not look at evidence based best practices? Why is America so myopic in its views and why, as Timothy Noah says in Slate, do we think it somehow patriotic to achieve low scores. Long time Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid in his new book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care takes us on a global quest for better health and better health care.

2) Andrew Sullivan's Cover Story in the current Atlantic is a must for anyone who believes we must honestly move on from the debate in Iraq and Afghanistan and close this dark chapter in our nations history.

Friday, September 11, 2009

As much as we think today's technology is changing everything, between the mid 70's and the mid '80 a series of companies were born that created a real seismic shift in entertainment. In the mid 70's HBO forever altered the movie business. In the early '80's MTV reshaped the music industry. And in 1979, ESPN was born and would forever change the face of sports. ESPN The Company: The Story and Lessons Behind the Most Fanatical Brand in Sports, is leadership expert Anthony Smith's story of a network launched by sports junkies, funded by an oil company, marginalized by critics, yet it would ultimately transform sports into a global business.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Israel is changing. Two interviews this week shed light on the changing face of Israel both in country and in the the US Congress. First Rich Cohen gives us insight into what makes modern Israel and modern Jews tick. In his book Israel Is Real, he explains the mishmash of politics, ideology and psychology that have gone into the deification of Israel.

Then, in hisNew York Times Magazine piece, award winning journalist James Traub talks about J Street, a new lobbying group with a very different mission of advocacy for Israel. He shows how the old lock step model of "what's good for Israel is good for America" may be on the way out.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Capitalism is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a bad system, expect for all the rest. It's taken a beating lately, but in spite of the recent excesses and the coming onslaught by Michael Moore, its ideas are tightly woven into our identity as Americans. Today, as the triumphs and failures of free market capitalism and globalization continue to hold sway over the daily news and our daily lives, Gretchen Morgenson, a leading business journalist at the The New York Times, argues in her new book,The Capitalist's Bible: The Essential Guide to Free Markets--and Why They Matter to You, that it's more important now than ever to understand how our economy works.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The reality of government is that it is never as good as we'd like it to be, or as bad as we usually think it is. This is abundantly clear and a kind of recurring theme in the new memoir by Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania and the first Secretary of Homeland Security. In The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...And How We Can Be Safe Again he comes across as an honorable man, trying to do an impossible job, amidst a nest of Bush administration vipers. There are so many questions and areas we did not have time to cover, but it's a reasonable overview of his tenure.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Every once in a while a family, a place and a cause come together to create a perfect storm that inexorably links there collective fate. Such was the case with the Mondavi's in the Napa Valley and with the Bacardi's in Cuba. Veteran NPR international correspondent Tom Gjelten, in his new book Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause takes a fresh look at the history of Cuba though the lens of the Bacardi family and in so doing shows us an island nation very different than fifty years of political sound bites.

About

I grew up during the Kennedy Presidency. It was a time when the best and the brightest sat center stage in the nation's psyche. I've always remembered the story, that at an arts gala at the White House, Kennedy looked around the room and proclaimed it "the greatest gathering of talent since Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Without the benefit of such trappings, I've had the opportunity, for the past nineteen years, to have a seat at an international banquet of ideas and history.
My radio program provided me a unique opportunity to "travel" around the world and speak to thousands of the most imaginative thinkers and leaders in the arenas of politics, religion, journalism, business, popular culture, academics, science, economics, history, and medicine.
During these years, I have taken many people with me on this journey. It has been a momentous time. The trauma of politics, the onslaught of technology, the insights of science, and the changes in the human condition make this a period almost unequaled in history. I'm excited that technology has now made it possible for me to take more of you along with me on this journey.